A Corpus-based Study Of Collocation Errors In C-E Translation By Chinese EFL Majors As Translation Learners

Collocation is one of the hot topics in contemporary linguistics. In the field of SLAresearch, it has been long recognized that collocation knowledge is an important part ofword knowledge, which constitutes an aspect of the differences distinguishing betweennative speakers and second language learners. As stated by a lot of researchers, collocationerrors account for a large proportion of the errors committed by second language learners.According to statistics counted by the Chinese Learner English Corpus, collocation errorsrank the sixth among the eleven major types of errors. C-E translation is a process ofapplying English to convey message in the Chinese original text. The quality of English inthe translated version determines that of translation. Therefore, English collocation is anintegral part of practicing and teaching C-E translation. In the past20years, Chineseresearchers on collocation errors committed by Chinese EFL learners have achieved a lot.But, as the relevant literature survey shows, most of the studies take Chinese non-majorEFL students as their object of study, and reports of researches of the collocation errors inthe Chinese EFL majors’ C-E translations are few and far between. In this sense, this studywill fill some blank in the field.The research question of the study is: what are the major types and features of thecollocation errors committed by Chinese English-majors in C-E translation? On the basis offinding by such research, the author will analyze the underlying causes of those collocationerrors. The object of research of the study is senior Chinese EFL majors. The basicprocedure of the research is: informed by theories of inter-language and based on ErrorAnalysis, with the help of Corpus for English Majors (CEM) and relevant concordancesoftware, a corpus-based empirical study of Chinese EFL majors’ collocation errors isconducted with the purpose of finding out the distribution and characteristics of these errors,exploring the probable causes of the errors, and thereby providing the pedagogicalimplications and some suggestions for translation teaching oriented to Chinese EFL majors.The research methods in the study include mainly the literature research method and thecorpus based empirical method. The major findings are as follows: The collocation errors found through the study aremainly of two aspects, the collocation errors from lexical perspective and the collocationerrors from grammatical perspective. From lexical perspective, the collocation errors canbe divided into the following six types: noun-noun collocation errors; noun-verbcollocation errors; verb-noun collocation errors; adjective-noun collocation errors; linkingverb-adjective collocation errors and adverb-adjective collocation errors.Verb-nouncollocation errors rank the first among the six types of collocation errors. The possiblecauses of these errors can be classified into four types: inter-lingual causes, intra-lingualcauses, combination of inter-lingual and intra-lingual causes and communicationstrategy-based causes.Based on the analysis of the findings, some pedagogical implications are pointed outand suggestions are offered. Firstly, in C-E translation teaching, more efforts should bemade concerning teaching English collocations in comparison with Chinese in teachingC-E translation to Chinese EFL majors. Secondly, teaching English collocations may beconducted more profitably with corpora and concordancers as aids, and more attentionshould be paid to giving full play to them in teaching C-E translation. Thirdly, the ChineseEFL majors should be encouraged to continue learning Chinese more consciously andcertain favorable conditions should be created to that end.